An ongoing dialogue on HIV/AIDS, infectious diseases, all matters medical, and some not so medical.

August 27th, 2016

ID Cartoon Caption Contest #1 Winner — and a New Contest for the End of Summer

All blogs worth the price of admission have a sidebar, and this one is no exception.

Critical components include (but are not limited to) the following:

The Option to Subscribe — Go ahead, you know you want to. It’s right over there to the right. Just enter your email address and click subscribe — no username, password, or two-step verification required. Then, kind of like colonization resistance, the notifications you’ll get of a latest post here will help crowd out those dubious invitations to conferences in China, Dubai, or Malaysia, the requests to submit papers for the The Journal of Infectious and Non-Infectious Diseases, and the people who are trying to sell us CRISPR reagents.

The Search Box, where you can enter diverse topics such as “Should I curbside ID about whether to give the rabies vaccine?” or “Why does he hate the term HAART?”

The Most Popular Posts list, which here is called, “Most Commented,” with another tab for “Most Read.”

In case it wasn’t obvious enough, I’ve highlighted that the first ID Cartoon Caption contest drew quite a response. If we add in entries that were sent to me directly via email, there were well over 200 submissions. Not bad for a debut performance.

The winner was Dr. Michael Dantzer, who has kindly given me permission to use his real name (I assume it’s his real name). As promised, he gets a free lifetime subscription to this blog and, of course, lasting fame and fortune.

He also sent me a nice note praising my excellent sense of humor in picking his entry as a finalist. It should be noted, however, that the selection of his entry as a finalist relied not so much on my subjective sense of what’s funny, but a highly complex algorithm that includes not only scientifically validated humor criteria but also gas liquid chromatography and multiplex PCR.

Anyway, it’s high time for a new contest. Summer is about to end, Labor Day cookouts loom, and we must be vigilant to the ever rising threat of both foodborne pathogens and carcinogenic heterocyclic amines:

Go at it. Put your entries in the comments section (preferred), on my Twitter feed, or email it directly to id.caption@yahoo.com.